Last Sunday, I spent 16 hours porting the memory scanner from Cheat Engine to a scripting language I use in windows for gaming automation purposes. Yup, 16 hours! I guess something clicked in my dream, and I woke up at 1AM and kept cracking at it for 16 hours straight! Tired? Not really. It was fun!
FUN is the keyword. If it's fun, I don't mind doing it more often. Heck, if it's fun, I WANT to do it ALL the time! The difference between being mentally tired from an 8-hour day-job, and being mentally enlightened from a 16-hour "hack and crack" is your attitude... and "Fun" is definitely the right attitude to have!
So, how about having FUN in an ICS programming assignment? Sure! The screenshot above is what we are doing in our ICS 613 class. Nope, we are not designing a game from scratch. Instead, we are competing in a robotic challenge called the Robocode.
Robocode is a Java-based competition arena for anyone interested in putting their minds and wits to the test. The challenge? Program your own robots and put your robots' intelligence to the test by competing against other robots. The catch? You need some Java know-how, be creative, and most definitely, time, to have fun!
The most challenging part of Robocode for me was trigonometry. Yes, you need MATH to play smart! In fact, all the good game engines out there uses Physics and lots of Math. It was an interesting and refreshing experience to see programmers pulling out their pencils and scrible away on a sheet of paper instead of typing up codes. I guess sometimes we forget: good software are designed and engineered. Sometimes the engineering notes all reside on the programmer's head (the easy ones). But most of the time, programmers need scratch paper too.
Additional Links:
The Robocode wiki: http://robowiki.net/wiki/Main_Page
Interesting Lessons on Robocode: http://mark.random-article.com/weber/java/robocode/
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